Look, you could watch some high-minded and sophisticated new show like The Great (which, to be fair, isn’t all that high-minded or sophisticated)—or you could say “screw it,” and tune in to Fox’s new American Gladiator-meets-American Ninja Warrior competition series Ultimate Tag, premiering May 20, instead. Who couldn’t use some meathead muscle right now, a forsaking of housebound neuroses in favor of visceral, unthinking being?

If only Ultimate Tag were as agile as the gymnastics required to convince yourself to watch it. The reasoning for the show’s existence is sound enough. Though American Ninja Warrior—a clever co-opting of a Japanese format highlighting the French athletic disciplines of Parkour and freerunning—is very popular, it lacks a certain American sporting spirit; that is to say, it has no human-on-human physical conflict. Sure, beating an obstacle course is cool—but what if an acrobatic, trash-talking menace were there as well, chasing down the person running the course? Certainly that would be cooler.

That description makes Ultimate Tag sound more exciting than it really is, though. For this show, Ninja Warrior’s obstacle courses have been flattened into mere lazy obstructions, low platforms to hop over or tunnels to crawl through as a “professional tagger” comes loping after contestants to rip flags off their vests. There’s certainly some limber grace to be found in these professionals; many of them leap and dart with remarkably fluid ease. But Ultimate Tag never achieves Ninja Warrior’s beguiling momentum. The game is too easy and over too quickly; contestants and taggers alike are too often thwarted by walls, by the limited constraints of the show.

The competition tries to juice things up in synthetic ways, mostly by turning the professional taggers into American Gladiator-esque characters, melding goofy nostalgia with our current obsession with superhero taxonomy. Yet they all end up sounding more like the saddos from the Twirl King Yo-Yo Company than anything heroic or fearsome. The taggers I’ve encountered thus far include The Flow, Geek, The Kid, Flame, Beach Boy, Iron Giantess, The Boss, La Flair, Atomic Ant, Bulldog, Caveman, Banshee, Big Deal, Spitfire, and, finally, Horse. Just, Horse. If there were any sense of irony, any winking camp, at play here, these names would be endearing. But they seem mostly serious, a grim fact which fills in a large portion of the depressing portrait Ultimate Tag draws of its ideal imagined viewer.

Geek has wild curly hair and talks about math in a nerdy voice when being interviewed by the hosts (football brothers J.J., Derek, and T.J. Watt), but he’s obviously just a hunk in glasses. Beach Boy’s Real Housewives-ian tagline is, “You’ll be getting my good vibrations, baby . . . When I scrape you off the floor!” Banshee is advertised as the wild one—“the terrifying crazy of Banshee” is the intro she gets—but mostly she just has funky makeup and dyed hair. (Her characterization also brings to mind Scary Spice of the Spice Girls, in that both are black women made to be frightening and animalistic for no discernible reason beyond the most terrible one.)

Audience members in the stands hold signs supporting various taggers, urging viewers to fear the Banshee and the like. But of course, this is a brand new show, so all this loyalty is entirely invented. “This is a dream come true,” one contestant says after winning a challenge, suggesting that he took a nap and had a dream during a commercial break. How else would his unconscious have known to dream about Ultimate Tag?

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The show is so strenuous in its titans-clash, tough-guy American branding that it lumbers past stupid fun and into irksome and awkward, a lot of flash and rumble over something that’s just not all that exciting to watch. American Ninja Warrior is a boggling wonder of ability, while American Gladiator reveled in the elaborate inanity of its setups. Ultimate Tag is an inartful scramble through cheap-looking sets, pursued by a Horse.

It can’t even hold the worries of the world at bay for 45 minutes. One contestant is asked what she’ll spend her $10,000 on if she wins. “Paying some bills!!” she yells, the audience forlornly clapping. Another contestant, asked about his strategy after a fitful tag session, says, “In my mind, all the tags were bills”—another debt-plagued American struggling to make it work as a guy called Big Deal thuds closer and closer behind him.

ABC’s Holey Moley, on the other hand, is a riot. Returning for a second season on May 21 (technically titled Holey Moley II: The Sequel), the mini-golf show serves up its extreme energy for laughs—there’s no attempt at coolness or toughness here. Comedian Rob Riggle and actual sportscaster Joe Tessitore (very game) offer colorful (and genuinely funny) commentary as eight mini-golf hobbyists square off each week to advance to the Holey Moley finals, where someone will win $250,000. So there is a sense of accumulation that Ultimate Tag lacks. Most crucially, there’s also an abundant spirit of play.

In the season two premiere, the show sets its first two contestants on fire. (They’re wearing protective gear, but, yes, some of that gear does actually catch fire.) Later in the episode, every missed putt results in an electric shock. The other challenges find ways to knock people over, into foam pits or pools of water, low (but satisfying) physical comedy in the vain of ABC’s dearly departed Wipeout. (Another American adaptation of Japanese programming.)

The contestants take their shots seriously, and thus so do you—there is real tension surrounding pretty much every putt. Yet there is also silliness, given arch framing by Riggle and Tessitore (and Steph Curry on occasion), that gently teases the golfers without mocking them. Holey Moley isn’t a show about embarrassment, not really. I mean, the players do look sort of mortified after they’ve been bopped into the water by a spinning windmill blade or have completely eaten it while trying to dive onto an automated shark while Jon Lovitz, dressed as a pirate, watches. But they also seem to realize it’s all in good fun, and that the audience is rooting for their success rather than their failure. (Maybe it’s like 80/20. Okay, 70/30.)

The trick to Holey Moley is simple, but not easy: it manages to balance irony with sincerity, without tipping into snideness or whatever overblown tone Ultimate Tag is going for. It’s airy, but has a minor sense of stakes. You will not learn anything watching it, but nothing about it will gnaw away at you either. Its pleasure is guilt-free, as all non-harmful pleasures probably should be. I don’t want to over-venerate a show as deliberately, happily dumb as Holey Moley, so I’ll stop here. But if you’re looking for a pseudo-athletic distraction—as summer begins wafting in through the window, bringing with it that restless itch for something light—it’s the show to beat. You could say, with only a little intended offense to Ultimate Tag, it’s it.